[Paraview-developers] [RFC] Changelog process?

[Ben Boeckel]

Hi,

After some discussion with Utkarsh, would anyone be opposed to having
ParaView adopt a directory (maybe `Documentation/rel/dev`?) in which to
drop markdown snippets which contain changelog snippets for merge
requests? This is similar to the process used for CMake for those
familiar.

At release, all of the files would be gathered up, put into a single
file (`Documentation/rel/VERSION.md`?) and would be our changelog for
the release. On release, all of the snippets in the `dev` subdirectory
would be removed (this makes it easy to see what is new, but not
released as well).

The robot would warn (not error) if a merge request doesn't add or
modify a file in the directory, mainly to remind developers that
changelog entries should be added.

Why not just use commit or merge request messages? Just scraping the git
logs has (at least) the following downsides:

  - no way to edit or remove old entries (typos, reverts, etc.);
  - no place for extras (such as images); and
  - special formatting for messages to say that they're "not important"
    (e.g., typos, reformatting) and should not be put into the
    changelog.

A single file is not ideal due to the conflicts that inevitably occur
when multiple merge requests are happening at the same time.

Thoughts?

--Ben